This Summer, There Will Be Shakespeare in Lots of Parks

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today, and on Fridays through the summer, we’ll focus on things to do in New York over the weekend.

Credit…Peter Cooper

By Maia Coleman

Before the Delacorte Theater in Central Park became the permanent home of Shakespeare in the Park, one of New York’s treasured summer pastimes, the annual Shakespeare festival got its start touring parks and playgrounds across the city.

Now, nearly 70 years since the famous theatrical producer Joseph Papp started that tradition with a production of “Julius Caesar” in an amphitheater in East River Park, the festival is returning to its roots. With the Delacorte closed for renovations this summer, the Public Theater, the nonprofit that presents Shakespeare in the Park, is taking the show on the road with roving performances of “The Comedy of Errors” in parks and plazas across all five boroughs through the end of June.

“This traveling squad of players is something that is deep in our roots,” Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director, said. “It’s really where the Shakespeare festival began.”

The first weekend of performances begins tonight at 6:30 p.m. on the terrace of the New York Public Library near Bryant Park, a fitting location — the library holds six copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio, including one housed at the Fifth Avenue branch. Performances will continue there through the weekend before moving to locations on Staten Island and in Hudson Yards next week.

This year’s show is a modern musical adaptation of the classic Shakespearean comedy of mistaken identity, performed by the Public’s Mobile Unit, a reincarnation of the theater’s original roving troupe, which played in parks and playgrounds across the city. The group performed the same show last year but has beefed it up this year to accommodate larger audiences and venues, Eustis said.